Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It's after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn't got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.
The end of the game doesn't look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.
I've been playing bg3 in nearly max settings at 4k on a RX6700 and it's been nearly flawless. I noticed a bunch of people commenting about higher end 30 series cards, does the game struggle on those?
The biggest issue I've found is the cpu usage. Especially in the city of BG I'll see 8+ cpu cores really getting a workout.
Really? Is he playing on 4k? If not I worry he's got a lemon. My 3070 only had the occasional stutter in act 3 and I played on near-max settings on 1440 and rarely dropped below 50fps
How does this bode well? PCs are extremely varied, as far as I know consoles have known components inside that can be targeted. This isn't the case with end-user PCs. So why does that translate to good tidings for us?
The series S is the lowest spec console that they are targeting. In order to get the performance they want out of it, they are trying to optimize as much of the game as they can. Those optimizations have decreased the amount of RAM, VRAM, and CPU load the game is using and those optimizations affect the PC version as well.